Gearing for a tourer

My wife is having a custom built tourer made as we speak (or write). The bike that it's replacing is a Edinburgh Coop Country Revolution which has
48,38,28 chain rings and 11-32 sprocket range. Dooes anyone know if this is sensible to replicate or is there a better way of achieving the lower gears?

For serious loaded up touring the gearing that your wife had would be perfect. For lightweight/faster touring maybe look at a compact chainset say 50/38. with a 12/27 cassette. My tourer has a mix of 105/Tiagra, 52/42/30 with a 12/27 cassette and it works fine for me. It comes down to what your wife is comfortable with.

If your current arrangement works for you, dont change it without good reason.

Do you need lower gears? I would!

Do you ever use 48/11 (That is a big gear for a touring bike)

Tell your frame builder what you like and dont like about your current gears and see what they suggest.

My personal view is that a 46/12 or 44/11 top gear is plenty big enough for touring. (I keep up with the local clubs fast group with nothing bigger than 46/12)

If you are after lower gears at the expense of higher gears I would suggest a MTB chainset which will be 24/34/44 ish combined with an 11 to 28 cassette. You could fit even smaller chainrings or larger cassette if necessary.

I'd go for 46/36/26 or even 46/36/24. I've always found lower gears more useful when touring, with the top gears rarely used. In general most off-the-peg bikes are too highly geared for their riders. They seem to be geared for the super-fit and healthy rider rather than the averagely good and experienced one.

To make an easy comparison between different wheel sizes and gear combinations, you're best to convert the combinations into 'inches'. Sheldon Brown and others have calculators on their websites.

As people have said, having to free wheel on rare occaisions because you don't have a gear bigger than 100 inches is not as annoying as having to push your bike up a hill for want of a 20 inch bottom gear.